{"id":2871,"date":"2005-05-22T13:31:53","date_gmt":"2005-05-22T17:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/05\/22\/2871.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:04","slug":"on-opium-karzai-rejects-us-cri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/05\/22\/on-opium-karzai-rejects-us-cri\/","title":{"rendered":"on Opium, Karzai Rejects U.S. Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So, it seems to me that the headline <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/worldlatest\/story\/0,1280,-5023643,00.html\">Karzai Rejects U.S. Criticism on Opium<\/a> is just sloppy. I mean, you can&#8217;t tell whether it&#8217;s Afghanistan&#8217;s president who is on Opium or the US critic. Or both. Or whether President Karzai is saying that the US criticism is &#8216;on Opium&#8217;, or whether the US is saying Pres. Karzai is &#8216;on Opium&#8217;. Or both.\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s silly; the headline clearly doesn&#8217;t mean any of those things. But seriously, what is the criticism? Is the opium not strong enough, not cheap enough, is it cut with shit, or is it that lethal stuff we keep hearing about? Is the problem a bad trip, or is the problem inadequate supply? And when President Karzai rejects that criticism, is it really just a cultural difference, rather than a real disagreement about the smack?\n<p>And you know, I mean you <I>know<\/I>, that when you get down to it, either somebody didn&#8217;t get paid, or somebody didn&#8217;t get their shit. This whole criticism and rejecting the criticism is just trash talk, and everybody knows it, right? The US says &#8220;Karzai &#8216;has been unwilling to assert strong leadership,&#8217; and then &#8220;Hamid Karzai said ... &#8216;we have done our job.&#8221; That sounds to me like there&#8217;s a shipment missing. I understand, nobody wants to tell the <I>Guardian<\/I> &#8216;we&#8217;re missing a fuckload of horse&#8217; or &#8216;some asshole split with the money&#8217;, because that&#8217;s embarrassing, right? But that doesn&#8217;t mean that the <I>Guardian<\/I> has to play the sap.\n<p>... it&#8217;s important to keep trying to see the funny side, right?\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, it seems to me that the headline Karzai Rejects U.S. Criticism on Opium is just sloppy. I mean, you can\u2019t tell whether it\u2019s Afghanistan\u2019s president who is on Opium or the US critic. Or both. Or whether President Karzai&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17418,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2871\/revisions\/17418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}